ars is
sleep, no doubt, and the rest vegetables. In the experience of
Wapping, Poplar, Rotherhithe, Limehouse, and Deptford, when they really
came to life, there was precious little sleep, and no vegetables worth
mentioning. They were quick and lusty. There they stood, long
knee-deep and busy among their fleets, sometimes rising to cheer when a
greater adventure was sailing or returning, some expedition that was
off to find further avenues through the Orient or the Americas, or else
a broken craft bringing back tragedy from the Arctic; ship after ship;
great captain after great captain. No history worth mentioning! There
are Londoners who cannot taste the salt. Yet, no doubt, it is
difficult for younger London to get the ocean within its horizon. The
memory of the _Oberon_, that famous ship, is significant to me, for she
has gone, with all her fleet, and some say she took Poplar's best with
her. Once we were a famous shipping parish. Now we are but part of
the East End of London. The steamers have changed us. The tides do
not rise high enough today, and our shallow waters cannot make home for
the new keels.

But to the old home now the last of the sailing fleet is loyal. We
have enough still to show what once was there; the soft gradations of a
ship's entrance, rising into bows and bowsprit, like the form of a
comber at its limit, just before it leaps forward in collapse. The
mounting spars, alive and braced. The swoop and lift of the sheer, the
rich and audacious colours, the strange flags and foreign names. South
Sea schooner, whaling barque from Hudson's Bay, the mahogany ship from
Honduras, the fine ships and barques that still load for the antipodes
and 'Frisco. Every season they diminish, but some are still with us.
At Tilbury, where the modern liners are, you get wall sides mounting
like great hotels with tier on tier of decks, and funnels soaring high
to dominate the day. There the prospect of masts is a line of derrick
poles. But still in the upper docks is what will soon have gone for
ever from London, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with sometimes a
white sail floating in it like a cloud. We had a Russian barquentine
there yesterday. I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships,
the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse
spars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered lift
skywards of main and mizzen poles. The model of this Russian shi